Word.ws English Dictionary

went by the board

went by the board is the simple past of go by the board.

Meaning of go by the board

Verb

go by the board (third-person singular simple present goes by the board, present participle going by the board, simple past went by the board, past participle gone by the board)

  1. (idiomatic) To fall or to go overboard; to be cast over the side of a ship.
  2. (idiomatic) To be superseded, rejected, or obliterated; to pass by with little consequence; to amount to nothing.
    • How many cups of tea I drank, because Dora made it, I don’t know. But, I perfectly remember that I sat swilling tea until my whole nervous system, if I had had any in those days, must have gone by the board.1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC

Questions about went by the board

What is went by the board the simple past of?
Went by the board is the simple past of go by the board.

Words near went by the board in the dictionary

  1. went bonkers
  2. went both ways
  3. went brrr
  4. went bust
  5. went by
  6. went by the board
  7. went by the name of
  8. went by the wayside
  9. went bye-bye
  10. went cahoots
  11. went chapter 11

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went by the board (page history and authors); go by the board (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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